More and More Parents Monitoring Online Activity of Their Teens

When I was a teen, the way parents snooped was so much different than it is today. When I was a teen, parents would enlist the help of neighbors to peek on us as we hung out in the empty lot on my street. They'd drive by the school to see if our bike was in the bike rack. They'd glance in our backpacks before while we were eating breakfast to see if we stuffed a change of clothes in it. They'd wait until we got on the bus for school and would go into our room to read our diaries or look through the drawers of our desk for secret notes from admirers.

How the world has changed.

These days, parents are up against more than our parents were when it comes to keeping tabs on their kids. The introduction of technology and the ability to have the internet at our fingertips means that parents aren't just looking through bedroom desks or doing a drive-by bike spotting.

An online survey conducted by Common Sense Media found that 25% of parents these days are tracking what their teens do online. If you're one of those parents and you think that you're up on everything your teen is doing online, think again.

According to Common Sense Media, "More than half of parents with teenagers age 14 to 17 say they are "extremely" or "very aware" of what their kids are doing online; just 30 percent of teens say their parents are "extremely" or "very aware" of what they’re doing online."

In other words, parents think they know more than their teens realize and teens think their parents aren't as on to things are they really are. At least that hasn't changed since I was a teen!